Dexter Morgan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Dexter Morgan | |
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| First appearance | Darkly Dreaming Dexter |
| Last appearance | Dexter |
| Information | |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | forensics expert serial killer |
| Family | Joe Driscoll (father) Laura Moser (mother) Brian Moser (older brother) Harry Morgan (adoptive father) Deborah Morgan (adoptive sister) |
| Portrayed by | Michael C. Hall |
| Created by | Jeff Lindsay |
Dexter Morgan is a fictional character in a series of novels by Jeff Lindsay, which include Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004), Dearly Devoted Dexter (2005), and Dexter in the Dark (2007).
In 2006, the first novel was adapted into the Showtime TV series Dexter. In the TV series, Dexter is played by Michael C. Hall.
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[edit] Character overview
Dexter is a blood spatter expert for the Miami-Dade Police Department, and a serial killer. He was taught by his foster father to only kill those he feels deserve to die. These are usually violent criminals (serial killers, rapists, etc) who Dexter thinks have escaped justice.
[edit] Character history
As a child, Dexter suffered an event so traumatic he repressed the memory.
Within both the television series and the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Dexter and his older brother Brian were trapped as children in a storage container at the docks in Miami, Florida for two days. They were surrounded by corpses, sitting in a two inch deep puddle of blood. One of the corpses was their mother (a small-time criminal murdered her with a chainsaw), something which both Dexter and Brian had witnessed. Both boys suffered irreparable psychological damage, and were left emotionally numb and prone to violence. Dexter was adopted by the investigating detective, Harry Morgan, while Brian was left to the child welfare system. The reason why Harry only adopted Dexter was the fact that Brian was old enough to clearly remember the murder and therefore he felt raising a child who had been traumatized to that extent would be difficult, likewise assuming that Dexter was too young to be affected by it. Dexter would not find this out until he was an adult, when he encountered his brother at the end of a homicide investigation.
Dexter began killing neighborhood pets as an adolescent. Harry found the animals' remains, and recognized that young Dexter was a sociopath with an uncontrollable need to kill. Harry decided to train Dexter to channel his violent urges in a "positive" direction: He taught his adopted son to be a cautious, meticulous and efficient killer, and showed him how to leave no clues. Harry also taught Dexter to live a public life that discouraged suspicion. Most importantly, Harry gave Dexter a system of ethical principles that Dexter came to call "the Code of Harry"; The central tenet of that code was to only kill people who are themselves killers.
Dexter committed his first murder at 19. Harry, who was dying of cancer in a hospice, gave Dexter "permission" to kill one of the nurses, who was murdering patients with overdoses of morphine.
Also featured in the series are Dexter's foster sister, Deborah, a police detective; his girlfriend, Rita; and Rita's two young children, Astor and Cody. His older brother Brian, meanwhile, is revealed to have also become a serial killer, dubbed in the television series as "The Ice Truck Killer", and as the "Tamiami Slasher" in the first novel.
[edit] Dexter's personality and sociopathy
Dexter Morgan is driven to kill to satisfy an inner voice he calls "The Dark Passenger." When that voice can no longer be ignored, he "lets the Dark Passenger do the driving" and commits murder.
Dexter considers himself emotionally divorced from the rest of humanity; In his narration, Dexter often refers to 'humans' as if he were not one of them. Dexter claims to have no feelings or conscience, and that all of his emotional responses are part of a well-rehearsed act to conceal who he truly is. He has no interest in romance or sex, and he considers his relationship with Rita to be part of his "disguise".
There are chinks in Dexter's emotional armor, however. He acknowledges loyalty to family, particularly his dead foster father: "If I were capable of love, how I would have loved Harry." Since Harry's death, Dexter's only family is his sister, Deborah, Harry's natural daughter. At the end of the first book, Dexter admits that he cannot hurt Deborah, or allow Brian to harm her, because he "is fond of her." He also appears to care more for Rita than he admits.
Dexter likes children, finding them to be much more interesting than their parents. The flipside of this is that Dexter is particularly wrathful when his victims prey on children. In Dearly Devoted Dexter, Dexter realizes that Rita's son Cody is showing the same signs of sociopathy as Dexter himself did at that age, and looks forward to providing the boy with "guidance" similar to that Harry provided Dexter with, viewing Cody as his own son. This also gives him a reason to continue his relationship with Rita.
Animals don't like Dexter, which can cause noise problems when Dexter stalks a victim who has pets.
[edit] Dexter's killing signature
Dexter's preferred style of killing entails seizing the victim from behind and injecting them with an anesthetic. In the television series this is specified to be an animal tranquilizer called etorphine hydrochloride (or M99) that renders his victims temporarily unconscious. The injection is a tradition established with his first victim, the hospice nurse.
When the victim wakes up, they are naked and secured to a table usually with bubble wrap and packing tape. The room around them is also completly covered in cleap plastic tarp to leave no signs of the murder afterwords. Dexter confronts them with narrative evidence of their crimes before killing them. In the novels, the method usually involves an extended exploration with various sharp knives; in the television series, Dexter's favored method is a battery-powered saw to the neck, with no apparent torture beforehand.
After the initial murder, Dexter collects trophies from his victims so he can relive the experience. Dexter's trophy signature is to slice the victim's cheek near the eye and collect a blood sample, which he preserves on a laboratory slide. In the television show, Dexter keeps blood slides from all his victims neatly organized in a wooden filing box that he keeps hidden inside an air conditioner in his apartment. In the book series, he keeps them in a box on his bookshelf, apparently in plain sight, but not particularly conspicuous.
He disposes of the body by dismembering it in several sections, wraping each section in a garbage bag and sealing it with duct tape. He then takes those individually wrapped sections out on his boat and disposes them into the ocean by dumping them overboard.
[edit] Dexter's biological family
In the novels, Dexter's brother is known simply as Brian; when Dexter was little, he had trouble saying Brian, so he called his brother "Biney". Neither parents' name has so far come up.
In the television series, Dexter's mother's name was Laura Moser. She was killed with a chainsaw, along with three other people, right in front of her two sons. His father's name was given as Joe Driscoll, but this was probably an assumed name, as there was no record of Joe Driscoll's existence before 30 years ago. It is implied that Brian murdered Driscoll with an injection of insulin to mimic a heart attack, but the body was cremated before Dexter could obtain proof. Dexter's brother's name was Brian Moser, so it seems likely that Dexter's name would have been Dexter Moser before he was officially adopted by the Morgans.
